Originally Posted by
Traffic_Is_Er_Was
Of course white people get shot by police too, but there are many more of them (75% of population vs 13%) They don't get shot in that ratio though, and it seems to be getting worse.
Cops don't shoot at people based on a quota system. You do understand that, right? The underlying social and contextual causes are not something simply explained in a sentence or two. People have written entire books and PhD dissertasions on this.
This article alludes to a few of the imbedded problems that are all "slices of cheese" lining up before an event occurs before the use of deadly force. (For my money, that essay has a few own goals as the author digresses into international issues, but he raises a few points worth thinking about).
The numbers I provided in that little graph are a snap shot of the a result of a complex series of events in a given interaction that leads to an officer, or multiple officers, using deadly force. If all you look at is those number, you will leap to an invalid conclusion, since all they tabulate is an effect of a multiple cause situation.
Sort of like aircraft accidents. If you don't dig into the deep cause factors, the numbers don't tell you much.
"Pilot error hang him, hang her, and press on."
And that's the attitude I see expressed in re this topic far too often.
As aviators, we ought to know better.
The cases that probably bother people the most is the unarmed person who ends up hit with a cop's bullet and dies. I'll say that those bother me the most. My question is generally: "Was there no other way to take control of this situation with the tools available?"
If there's an armed person and the cops are called in - yeah, people dial 911 and expect the cops to show up and do something about it. The whole point of having the police come is to get the situation under control.
One other thing to remember is this: the rise in crime rate in the 1960's and 1970's was measurable and a national disgrace, a national crisis. A very public debate and a political reaction was ongoing on that topic from the time I was in Junior High School.
In the mid 80's and the 90's a very loud persistent law and order lobby eventually solidified. That didn't happen in a vacuum. It happened as a result of rising crime and rising violent crime in our country.
As an aside, check out
this analysis of the 1992 Rodney King riots by a national guard commander. One of the points that really struck home as I reviewed that was the difference between 1992 and the Watts riots in the 1960s. Gangs in the 60s were not anywhere nears as heavily armed as in the 90s.
It is no coincndence that this hard nosed law and order lobby arose in parallel with "the war on drugs" that has been covered elsewhere. Also related to this is the increase in the incarceration rate over the past 30 years. The "three strikes and you are out" and "minimum / mandatory sentencing guidelines" was to me, at the time, overreach of the Legislative Branch into Judicial Branch functions. (I didn't like it then and I don't like it now). But that attitude, which passed into law in the 90's, is directly related to the advocacy of more aggressive policing as a standard. I'd say it's been a sustained drive since the mid 1990's which 9-11 only fed in a hundred ways, not all of which are healthy.
If you look at Airbubba's link from a page or so back "who are those guys?" you see a case of creeping federal bloat that began with the 9-11 attack and it hasn't stopped since then. That's three straight adminstrations who have resorted to increased federal involvement in state matters, and the one previous, Clinton Administration, was the actual initiator of this. They called it OOTW then and here's the argument that was presented timd and again: if we are spending all of this money on the military, then why can't we have them do ... {X}. It is now codified as DSCA.
People who worry about federal over reach have slowly realized that we've been boiling a frog on this since about 1991.
But hey, the crime rate is now less than it was then. Mission Accomplished, right?
What people are asking now is this: "Is how we got here healthy and sustainable?"
What other people are asking, getting back to aviation, is:
"Do we even need pilots at all?" And some folks answer with this kind of tripe: With pilot error being to prominent, getting rid of them is the better idea."
I know very well why we went to armed drones for certain missions in the military.
I also know why replacing pilots with robots in commercial aircraft, and troop transports, is horrible misapplication of reasoning, and is equivalent to the sloppy reasoning that let to your arriving at your post.
Need to peel back the layers of the onion one by one; there's a lot going on in there.